Confessions of a cut and paste artist

From William Gibson, in Wired

"Today’s audience isn’t listening at all – it’s participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record,
the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The
record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very
nature of the digital.
Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process
generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?).
To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic.
The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of
the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the
mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two
centuries…

We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we
plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We
legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we
can, while our new technologies redefine us – as surely and perhaps as
terribly as we’ve been redefined by broadcast television."

Read God’s Little Toys

We Welcome Your Comments

Comments

3 replies
  1. eT says:

    Interesting perspective … we are trying to promote audiences to participate in music by having them rate/vote for music they like – only problem is, very few people, it seems, go to the internet to find new music … mostly musicians, but hardly ever the consumer… is this true?

  2. Dave Kusek says:

    eT

    More and more music fans are finding their new music online. This happens on web sites like aol, myspace and purevolume (among many others). People are also finding new music from each other via instant messaging and email. Not to mention those billions of files being traded every month on the P2P networks.

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply